Just a collection of random fun facts :D

1. Gloopy ethanol
2. Supercooled water and strawberries
3. I tried explaining ROP chains to an AI
4. Pericyclic Boc Deprotection
5. I went to the same restaurant 3 times without knowing

Ethanol becomes gloopy at low temperatures

Did you know that ethanol has a freezing point of -114.1°C :O

If you cool ethanol down to a decently low temperature (say -50°C and lower), its viscosity will increase quite noticably, and it will turn from a nice flowy liquid to this strange thick gloopy substance. It does definitely make sense for the viscosity of a liquid to increase with decreasing temperature, but I guess we just don’t notice it that much with water as the freezing point of water is not very low.

Supercooled water and strawberries

You might have seen that party trick where a bottle of water almost instantly goes from liquid to solid with a little agitation. This is due to water being cooled to below its freezing point – also known as supercooling. Generally, the water used has to be very pure; this is as any solid impurities can act as nucleation sites for ice crystals to form. Technically, it is possible to supercool water all the way down to −48.3°C, where homogeneous nucleation then occurs.

Our university held a demonstration lecture to promote Chemistry to the public, and I was in charge of preparing the supercooled water. We had these annealed glass tubes (so that the edges would be free of scratches that could potentially act as nucleation sites) which we would fill with HPLC grade water. The tubes would then be cooled in an 1:1 ethanol-water mixture held between −7°C to −13°C, and the water temperature would be monitored via thermocouples. This was the setup that we used:

Maintaining the water in a supercooled state and getting the temperature as low as possible was actually way harder than expected! The water had to be incredibly pure, and all equipment had to be thoroughly rinsed and free of dust. And even so, I had to minimize any sort of agitation to the setup – the shockwaves from demo explosions happening in the lecture theatre have actually managed to set off my tubes as well! Basically, the entire setup was exceptionally finnicky.

While researching methods to reach a lower temperature, I happened to come across this paper about supercooling in frozen strawberries (apparently the texture and appearance of frozen strawberries is dependent on the growth of the ice crystals?? 0.0). According to the paper, if the strawberries were cooled to 2.9°C, held at that temperature for a period of time, and then cooled further, they would have the highest supercooling capacity. So I was like, hey, why not try this on my tubes? I would cool the tubes from room temperature to 2.9°C, hold them at that temperature for a couple of minutes, and then cool them down further. I am not sure whether this is due to confirmation bias, but I believe that the tubes of water were indeed able to reach a lower temperature! The lowest temperature that I was able to reach was −7.6°C.

During the demonstration, the lecturer would take one of the tubes, and touch the thermocouple probe to the side of the wall to initiate crystallization. This is how it looked like:

Nevertheless, I think that this was really interesting – if you do know whether “annealing” the tubes at 2.9°C would actually have improved their ability to reach lower temperatures, do definitely let me know!

I tried explaining ROP chains to an AI

I made an AI listen to me yap about ROP chains for fun and apparently the AI likes my ROP chain analogy.

Huh. 
Damn, that's pretty complicated. 
But I think I understand. 

Yeah I guess so...
...
Now that I'm thinking about it though, that's a surprisingly decent analogy...

Boc protecting groups falling off at high temperatures may be due to a pericyclic reaction

If you have worked with Boc groups, you will notice that under high temperatures, they tend to fall off, even in the absence of an acid like TFA D:

This is due to the thermal deprotection of Boc, which is actually regarded as a potentially greener pathway since no catalyst nor acid is required. The mechanism is as such:

However, one of my supervisors suggested that deprotection could potentially go via a pericyclic mechanism:

Pretty cool, eh?

Vinitus, Ciudad Condal and Cervecería Catalana are basically the same restaurant

So I took a trip to Barcelona this summer. I absolutely LOVE food, so I spent the entire trip stuffing my face with tapas (I LOVE TAPAS ❤️). A Google search recommended Vinitus, Ciudad Condal and Cervecería Catalana, so we planned to hit those three places. After going to Vinitus for lunch, we went to Ciudad Condal for dinner, and realized that the menu was basically the same 0.0

A quick search later on revealed that all three restaurants were run by the same group. My family originally intended to take Cervecería Catalana off the itinerary after finding out, but we’ve already been to two of the restaurants, so why not complete the tour? After much pestering, they finally gave in, and we went to three of basically the exact same restaurant in Barcelona :D (the food is excellent though. I highly recommend it, but if you wanna find out my absolute favourite tapas place so far, read on.)

…While writing this much later on, I realized, that there is a FOURTH restaurant – La Flauta (the name of the restaurant group itself). I thought that I have completed the go-to-the-exact-same-restaurant tour, but looks like I now have to make another trip to Barcelona to truly finish it :O

As of now, my absolute favourite tapas place is Güell Tapas. Sure, it’s in a touristy area, but the arroz negro and Andalusian chipirones are INCREDIBLE. We went there twice (I think you can see a pattern by now :D).

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